


With My Head and Hands

by Aeolian



Category: Captain America (Movies), Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Budapest, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Minor Character Death, Where Was Clint Barton During Captain America 2?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 06:06:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2218605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aeolian/pseuds/Aeolian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So, Clint’s on the run from Captain America after blowing up two cop cars with an internationally-wanted fugitive and a dead man. Okay, so this looks bad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Occam's Goldberg Machine

**Author's Note:**

> They ask me where I've been,  
> And what I've done and seen.  
> But what can I reply  
> Who know it wasn't I,  
> But someone just like me,  
> Who went across the sea  
> And with my head and hands  
> Killed men in foreign lands...  
> Though I must bear the blame,  
> Because he bore my name.  
>    
>  _\- Back, by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson_

Okay, so Clint's on the run from Captain America after blowing up two cop cars with an internationally-wanted fugitive and a dead man. Uh, this looks bad.

Let's try this again.

\---

A year and change after saving the world from aliens, Clint was finally deemed sane enough to rejoin the world at large. He celebrated by promptly signing up for an undercover mission with the longest time away from the Helicarrier he could find--infiltrating the new Quebec branch of the Outlaw motorcycle gang, which, apart from riding really sweet bikes, also trafficked women, designer drugs and Stark weaponry Tony hadn't yet managed to find and destroy.

The mission was turning out to be a cakewalk. Clint's French was passable, and the new chapter was handing out patches to just about anyone, even American expats who fled the recent Fed shakeup in Texas, so his accent wasn't even out of place. The custom Sportster HR gave him was no Triumph Rocket III, but she purred in all the right places and looked real good to boot. Even the road captain was real accommodating, and four months into the milk-run, while waiting for the road captain to show up outside the casse-croute hole-in-the-wall, he wondered if this was S.H.I.E.L.D.'s idea of a paid vacation for him.

He should have realized it was too easy when he awoke to the sudden application of fist to face.

Aww, nose.

Clint peeked around under the guise of rolling his head in pain, and discovered that he was in a dark, dilapidated warehouse, with two subpar goons standing around and cracking their knuckles, three clear exits, and LePetre the road captain too far to reach him if he ran. The only issue might be--yep, he was duct-taped to the ancient wooden chair, all right.

"Frank Louis," said LePetre, lit overdramatically by the room's single incandescent light bulb, and Clint would play along and nod, except, wait, that was his alias for a different job in Australia. LePetre leered with all of his tobacco-stained teeth.

"What's a  _tabarnack_  Bandido punk like you doing in our ranks?" The two goons circled Clint as LePetre studied his chipped nails, "You got any more  _chums_  here with you too?"

One of the goons kicked over Clint's chair, knocking all the air out of him, and Clint, figuring he might as well take a chance when it was giftwrapped for him, threw his weight against the concrete floor so that the impact jarred the loose slats out of their unglued joints, and swung them around like yantoks. He grabbed the first goon by his wrist and drove the narrow end of the slat into the nerve cluster behind his ear. The second goon grappled Clint from behind as he was trying to free his legs, and Clint body slammed himself, chair and all, into him, and rolled off the tangle of wood and limbs.

Finally free of his restraints, Clint heaved himself up, only to be met with an incoming fist. Clint almost sidestepped out of the way, and wow was that a punch. His ears rang even though it barely grazed his head. LePetre swung again, but Clint grabbed his wrist, then the other wrist as he swung again, and then twisted at the waist, throwing the ridiculously heavy man to the ground. He yanked his arm back into a stress hold, and leaned so he could growl in his ear.

"Where did the leak come from?"

LePetre opened his mouth to answer, and then suddenly sagged, like all his strings had been cut.

A hypodermic dart stuck out of his jean-clad thigh. Clint pressed two fingers to the cool skin, but found no heartbeat. Feeling more darts puff past his head, Clint bolted to his feet, ripping duct tape off with his teeth and dove out of the nearest warehouse door into the night.

So much for the world's easiest mission.

\---

Sitwell had a more laid-back approach to handling than Coulson did, so Clint was used to days on end of radio silence. But no one was answering any of the channels Clint pinged. His hearing aid was on the fritz after that punch, so he went back to the emergency safe house for spares. He realized something was off halfway up the driveway. One of the upstairs bedroom windows was slightly ajar, the hair in the crack at the top of the door was gone, and the serene Laval suburb was quiet. Too quiet.

Letting the house keys jingle back into his pocket, Clint turned around to hotwire his neighbor's silver Ford Focus.

The radio was on, in French too fast to catch more than one word in four, so Clint flipped over to the only news broadcast in English. It was an AM channel, and Maroon 5 and static both faded in and out over the radio host.

"--involvement in the recent leakage of classified files from an intelligence agency known as Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, or S.H.I.E.L.D. for short. The informant is believed to be Agent Natasha Romanoff--"

Clint nearly drove off the road. Should he stay or go? He never left behind unfinished business if he could, but some things went beyond the mission. He went with his gut, and swerved sharply onto the nearest freeway ramp to a chorus of angry horns. Sitwell could write him up all he wanted afterwards. He barely listened to the rest of the broadcast. Instead, he snuck into the LaSalle College apartment complex for a laptop and unsecured Wi-Fi, and spent half the night reading through all the files over himself that had been released.

It turned out to be all of his cover identities, the locations of all of his safe houses in the Americas as well as most of the ones overseas, and worst of all, all of his paystubs with the bank account numbers clearly visible.

Essentially, he had a choice between being comfortable and dead, and being alive but homeless and penniless.

He had to get in touch with Natasha. After running a few more searches, he returned the laptop to its owner, who was still drooling on the same spot on the rug, surrounded by stacks of books, printouts and empty Red Bull cans, and drove across the border to Franklin, Vermont, where he bought a burner phone. He texted to her Skype number  _back home early louis coming over_  and staked out a back corner at a local greasy spoon to wait.

He was still halfway through his bacon burger when his phone buzzed.  _cant wait 2 c u tigr where ru? ;)_ it said, and Clint's blood ran cold. It didn't have any of their code phrases, and he'd email her, but the phone was already compromised, and if they were already tracking the phone number, he couldn't afford to stick around and find a computer. He dumped the burner phone in a curbside trash can, switched cars, and headed south down I-87. He didn't see her safe house outside Baltimore in any of the files, and he was reasonably sure no one else knew the location.

When he slipped in through the second-story window, it was clear that no one had been in Natasha's IKEA-catalogue apartment in a very long time. He tripped every motion and heat sensor he could find, blew dust off the remote control and 32-inch flat screen, and kicked back on the plastic-lined couch.

Six hours later, and caught up on Dog Cops (finally!), his own motion sensor was tripped. He glanced at the video feed, and it wasn't Nat's face that greeted him, it was--

"Wow, is it just me or did Brock Rumlow get even uglier?" he said, slinging a bug-out bag over his shoulder and checking that the dishes were put away. Nat would forgive him borrowing her guns and the sweatshirts that were originally his, but Lord preserve him if she ever found him putting scratches in her Wedgewood--

"You did not."

\---

_Clint pauses in mid-sentence, squinting at Natasha._

_"Didn't what?"_

_"Put the dishes away," says Natasha, crossing her arms, "They were laying there in the sink with marinara sauce practically fused to the surface."_

_"Must've been Rumlow, 'cuz I know I washed those dishes."_

_"You did not. And why would Rumlow make himself a plate of spaghetti in my apartment?"_

_"C'mon guys," whines Kate, "I want to hear the rest of the story."_

\---

Anyway, so after Clint  _checked that the dishes were washed and dried_ , he gave Rumlow the slip out the back door. He wasn't familiar with the sleepy town of Pleasant Hills, and figured his chances of blending in were better in Baltimore, so he legged it there and cased out an odd-looking skyscraper he noticed on the drive past the city. It was perched on the waterfront, has excellent sightlines over all of Baltimore, and best yet, except for a narrow band of light twenty stories up, was completely vacant.

The tenants appeared to be new, and Clint rode in with the construction workers, grumbling amicably with them about the crew boss's crazy schedule. A short trip through the ventilation shaft in the men's room, and he suddenly found himself in a pad off the cover of a 1985 interior design magazine.

Mirrored walls (great for seeing around corners), marble flooring (no creaking) and solid brass ornaments (in case of intruders) all made it a good hideout. What really sold him though, was the giant spiral staircase leading up to the master bedroom--no blind corners. He settled his sack on the kitchen island, and decided to catch up on sleep.

Of course, that was when he found Leather Dracula sprawled in a nest of blankets in the master bedroom.

"Hi...bro," he said, trying to back away without looking like he was backing away. Leather Dracula glared murderously.

"Look, I can be on my way--I never saw you, right? Leave you here to...do whatever."

Leather Dracula made as if to get up, arm whipping to his pocket quicker than Clint could reach for his back holster...and promptly passed out.

"Well," said Clint, awkwardly.

\---

Turned out, not only was Leather Dracula severely dehydrated and malnourished, he also had a badly dislocated shoulder that was healing wrong, and a metal arm that was all but useless except for intermittent twitching. Now, Clint had been told by plenty of people over the years that he couldn't buy a clue to save his life, but it seemed to him like it was worth shelling out for this.

"So, uh, what do I call you?" he asked, setting down a third bowl of Spaghetti-O's.

The Winter Soldier grunted and continued shoveling neon-orange goodness in his face. Clint had reservations about not keeping that arm in a sling, but A) he wasn't spoon-feeding the world's scariest Soviet ghost, nossir and B) the joint seemed to be healing extraordinarily fast on its own. With every bowl he was getting more range of motion back.

The Winter Soldier licked the bowl clean and wiped his mouth with a sleeve.

"Dunno," he said.

"Welp, I guess put her there, Gotham, I'm Clint," said Clint, holding out his hand for Gotham to shake, "So what brings you to the fair city of Baltimore anyway?"

Gotham's eyes were already drooping before he finished the sentence, so after a pause, Clint just held the spoon and empty bowl out of the way and let the inevitable happen. Gotham slowly face-planted into the mountain of blankets.

"HYDRA," said Gotham hours later. Clint jerked awake, hand resting on the grip of his silenced revolver. He hadn't sensed anything but--

"Hunting HYDRA."

Clint scrubbed a hand over his face. His phone's welcome screen glowed a cheery  _03:19_.

"Yeah?" he said, clearing his throat, "What've you got?"

Gotham frowned in concentration, then said, "Bank vault."

\---

_"And then we fast-forward through the wacky investigation montage," says Clint, twirling a finger in circles, "So, anyway--"_

_"Nuh-uh, no skipping," says Kate, lifting her chin._

_"Seriously? That shit only looks good in the movies," says Clint. They're moved from popcorn to someone's salted caramel almonds, and Clint pops a couple in his mouth. "In real life, it's a bunch of folks sitting around looking unshaved and crazy-eyed. It's_ tedious _. I even had time for a trip to Spruce Knob."_

_"Why didn't I know about this?" squeaks Kate, "Skiing? You?"_

_"I had a good reason," says Clint, ignoring her questions._

\---

Okay, so they had been at it for about three days, and Clint ended up having to hand feed a Soviet ghost anyway, Gotham's hand and eyes glued to the flickering laptop screen. Around their feet, red X's were steadily growing on maps of greater D.C. Gotham had found most of them by matching memory to Google street view snapshots, but some, he got by matching up landmarks.

None of them were a bank.

Clint was getting worried. He could keep stealing things, but he was pretty sure someone was going to report the strings of petty thefts soon, not to mention the trail of grand theft auto, if they hadn't already. They needed to be less conspicuous.

"Hey, I'm going to grab stuff," he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, "Do you need anything or--?"

Gotham grunted and gave a quick shake of the head.

He drove out to the Allegheny Mountains in a beat-up blue Accord. Clint could occasionally plan ahead, and stashed a number of safety deposits in case he needed to lay low or was prematurely retired. This one was buried in the Monogahela National Forest. It took about three trips, dodging Rangers the entire time, but he managed to secure four pistols, two carbon fiber bows, a gross of various arrows, eighty pounds of ammo, survival gear and a decent amount of cash under the cushions and floorboard of the coupe. Yeah, he can't believe it all fit either and he was  _there_. The brisk mountain air was a refreshing break from being cooped up for days on end, so he took the scenic route through Cumberland, making it back to Baltimore just after night fell.

The penthouse was absolutely trashed.

The chairs were stacked like brocade-wrapped firewood, the gold-plated fireplace lay in rubble, and, impressively, the remains of the massive crystal chandelier was spread like a fine layer of snow over every square inch of the place.

Clint padded on cat feet on the powdered glass, arrow nocked and drawn. There were sounds of a scuffle in the master bedroom, and Clint climbed the stairway as quickly and carefully as he could. Nothing moved below him.

Gotham kicked the final panel of the dresser into tinder as Clint rounded the corner. The rest of the room stood in similar disarray.

Clint lowered his bow. "Picked a fight with the furniture?"

Gotham glared.

"Want to talk about it?"

More murderous silence. Amazingly, two things were in pristine condition: the laptop running the standard screensaver, and the stitched-together map, neatly folded.

"It doesn't make sense," growled Gotham.

"What doesn't?" said Clint.

Gotham closed the laptop and spread the map out on top, presumably because it was the only clean and level surface left in the entire penthouse. Clint stared at the seemingly random placement of X's all across northern Virginia and southern Maryland. There had to be a pattern; if only--

"What the furthest you've traveled on foot for a mission?" asked Clint.

"Ten miles. Why?" said Gotham.

"Let me try something."

Clint grabbed the pen from where it had rolled into a corner, coming back with a piece of string to tie it at an angle to the shaft of an arrow. He checked it against the legend, then swept the makeshift compass around each point on the map. He knew there were gaps in his blue-tinted memories, parts that never came back, and he figured there were enough overlaps in their experiences that the gaps might apply for the same reason.

Clint could see Gotham's eyes big as saucers in his peripheral vision. The pattern was obvious, now that they had put it down on paper. Almost all of the metropolis was evenly covered, except for small pockets here and there, one right smack in the heart of D.C. And right in the center of that--

"The Intra-American Progress Bank," said Clint, with a showman flourish.

"Never shit where you sleep," agreed Gotham.

They made their way down to street level, both dressed courtesy of a clothesline in Virginia, and broke into the bank embarrassingly easily.

Gotham seemed to be something of a topic expert. While Clint was debating from which of the six floors they should start, Gotham had already disabled the bank's alarm system and shimmied open a third floor window. Inside, the office furniture had apparently never been updated since its founding in the '50s, and the bank was still using old-school dumbwaiters for files.

Clint popped one open, and seeing a clear path to the bottom, gave a thumbs up. They rappelled into the basement, and disabled the vault's magnetic lock by modifying his electro-arrowheads into EMP generators. It looked like Clint's experience in dropping in on paranoid oil sheiks was a transferable skill set after all.

The vault was eerily silent, just them, the rows of safety deposit boxes and the strobing fluorescent lights. They swept the place end to end, but there was nothing behind any of the gated compartment. Gotham paced the length of one of the cages, hands fisted in frustration.

"It was here. I know it," he muttered.

Clint squinted. In the light of the half-burnt-out tubes, it was hard to make out, but parts of the floor looked cleaner than others, and one particular spot...he drew his thumb down a hairline crack, and the entire floor shuddered.

Clint jumped back. Panels of the wall slid back smoothly, revealing an Apple II monitor and a bank of servers. Gotham brushed past him, powered it up, and then plugged in the world's biggest thumb drive.

Clint shrugged and delegated himself to lookout detail. The panels had shuddered to a stop, and the only other object in the room seemed to be Orin Scrivello's wet dream of a dentist chair. Clint winced and crept to a better vantage point of the vault door.

The elevator at the far end of the basement came to life, sinking from the second floor.

"Hey, Gotham, time to go," said Clint. Gotham grunted and unplugged the thumb drive, and then froze at the sight of the dentist chair.

Clint remembered the one time his whole family had visited the State Fair in Des Moines. Barney had adored the ancient carousel brought in from a nearby town. Clint, on the other hand, had been haunted by nightmares for years of the bleak, vacuous eyes of the various animals as they loomed past him. The look in Gotham's eyes reminded him of those carved wooden animals', and had just about as much life in them. The hairs on the back of Clint's arms rose in goosebumps.

"Hey," he tried again, snapping his fingers, "Gotham, snap out of it."

The elevator at the end of the hall dinged and slid open with a pneumatic groan. A security guard froze in the middle of a stretch upon seeing them.

"Hey, what are you--"

Gotham jerked back to himself, slammed his fist against the nearest glass pull station cover, and yanked down the handle.

The security guard yelled something, running toward them, but it was lost in the sudden scream of the fire alarm. His hand went to something in his pocket.

Clint delivered two quick jabs to the guard's deltoid and neck, and then put the man out with a sleeper hold. He looked up just in time to miss the elevator going up. A stream of goons poured out of the emergency stairwell.

"Hey, we should probably--"

There was no one behind him. Gotham had vanished into thin air.

The grunts outside started rolling the door back close. Clint dove for the entrance, and took down the closest three with a hammer strike to the temple, an elbow to the kidney and a front kick to the groin. The rest shuffled back uneasily, until someone in the back yelled, "Cut off one head, two more take its place!"

"Hail HYDRA!"

They came swarming forward. Clint unholstered his gun and fired. The first bullet ricocheted off a steel beam and lanced across a throat before embedding itself in someone's gut. The second dropped a goon coming out of the stairwell, propping him against the door. The third he fired between the eyes of the grunt closest to him, wished that he had argued harder for his bow, and pistol whipped the next two idiots to step within arm's reach.

"Hail HYDRA!" yelled a goon in the back before she twisted open a gas cylinder of jaundice green fumes.

Clint yanked his shirt over his nose and mouth, but then someone sucker punched him in the gut. He doubled over and gasped, dragging in a lungful of burning, bleached-flavored air. He roundhouse kicked the guy, sending him sprawling into the one behind him, then ran up the jumble of flailing limbs, launched himself off the guy's shoulder, and just barely clung to exposed ceiling beams. He hauled himself across the hall jungle gym style, everyone else too busy retching and writhing on the floor to bother grabbing his legs.

At the door, he kicked the body aside, and slammed the door shut. Already his eyes stung, and every breath felt like inhaling fire. He blinked away involuntary tears and stumbled up the stairs.

Gotham wasn't on the ground floor, nor on the second nor third.

Sirens wailed in rising notes outside. Clint, now on the fourth floor, had to sit down to draw in breaths between his knees. He leaned against the closest wall of windows and saw fire engines pulling up, red spreading like watercolor across his blurry vision. It was time to go.

He spent the rest of the night dry-heaving on various rooftops, unable to leave the scene in case Gotham needed help.

When morning rolled around and he was reasonably sure he wasn't being followed, he dropped back onto street level to look for Gotham. None of the local papers seemed interested in the event, which was ominous, and none of the police reports included a description of a man with a metal prosthesis. He tried some of the new friends he had made on the street, but no one had seen anything. He tipped them anyway.

He needed more data to work off of, so he headed back to the penthouse after the last office workers had gone home, a knot of dread in his gut, thinking of Gotham's dead-eyed stare in the vault and all the terrible files on the Winter Soldier he read in Montreal.

Stupid. He should have taken this mission by himself. Who knew what triggers HYDRA might have planted in his mind? What would happen to him if they captured him? Was he hurt? Was he dead?

Lost in thought, he barely noticed the swept-clean apartment, until he realized there was someone sitting in the taped-together chaise.

"Hi," said Gotham.

All of the guilt and frustration in Clint's chest boiled over into rage.

"Where the hell have you been?" Clint snarled.

Gotham raised a speaking eyebrow.

"I have been looking for you all over the city for an entire day," said Clint, unable to stop his voice rising until it was a shout, "I thought you were dead, or worse and you couldn't even be bothered to--"

His throat, sore from a day of coughing and heaving dry air, protested in a series of painful, honking coughs. It went on and on and Clint curled up, shaking and trying to cough without air in his lungs. The blood roared in his ears.

Gradually, the coughing subsided, and Clint could draw in shuddering breaths, sagging in relief. He discovered Gotham was rubbing slow circles into his back, murmuring, "It's okay, Stevie. I got you. I got you right here."

Clint swallowed, throat as dry as the Syrian Desert. "My name's Clint, remember?"

Gotham blinked. "What'd I say?"

Clint shook his head and tried to get to his shaky feet, but Gotham shoved him down, glaring daggers.

"Where do you think yer going, punk?"

"Water," croaked Clint. He's not above employing grabby hands. Gotham rolled his eyes, but fetched water from the kitchen for him anyway.

"What's with the--" Gotham gestured at his own throat.

Clint sipped at the water. "Chlorine gas. The HYDRA grunts got the most of it."

"Good," said Gotham with dark satisfaction. Clint drained his glass.

"So what about you?"

"Museum."

"You ditched me to sightsee?" said Clint, a little stung, "Wow, I thought we were bros."

"Bros?" said Gotham, startled.

"I mean, if you're cool with that," said Clint, rolling the glass between his palms. The fireplace was mostly repaired, he noticed.

Gotham, too, seemed at a loss for words, so Clint handed him the glass. Gotham came back with another glass of water.

Clint asked, awkwardly, "So what'd you find in the museum anyway?"

"I got a name," he said, a little wonderingly.

"Okay. So what do I call you?"

"Bucky."

Clint made what he hoped was a neutral sound in reply. A lot of things were clicking together in his mind.

"What?" said Bucky, waspish, "What's wrong with Bucky?"

"Well I  _was_  going to upgrade you to Batman, but if you're going to insist on lame nicknames..."

Bucky cuffed him upside the head and Clint laughed, before coughing again.

\---

Bucky stuck in the oversized thumb drive into a port on the side of the laptop, and Clint gave a low whistle.

"Who the hell needs a terabyte of storage space?" he said in awe.

"We might," said Bucky, unfurling the map, "Look. I mapped out a couple hubs where they'll have more of these computers, but I'm pretty sure we'll find more as we go."

The nearest hub was in Raleigh, so they piled into a black Hyundai Elantra, Clint at the wheel and Bucky still scrolling through the files so fast the words were a blur on the screen.

Just outside Richmond, Bucky suddenly said, "Huh, good for you, Steve,"

"Huh?" said Clint, halfway through  _Stairway to Heaven_.

Bucky turned the screen towards him, but even through his peripheral vision, Clint could see it was tiny, dense, and probably in some Eastern European language.

"Driving, bro," he said, "Read it to me."

Bucky sighed, long suffering, but dutifully scrolled to where the conclusion apparently was and translated, "Project Phoenix--that was this thing back in the '60s when they took everything out of Zola's--he was this evil Nazi scientist, tried to replicate the Super Serum--anyway, they took everything out of Zola's brain and stuck it into a bunch of computers. They then copied all these computers, and stuck them everywhere--Project Phoenix has been shelved after all copies have been destroyed, the last, located in Wheaton, New Jersey, by missile strike, presumably in an act of self-defense against Captain American and co-saboteurs."

"Good for Steve indeed," said Clint, thumping the wheel, "Wheaton. Isn't that where Camp Lehigh was?"

Bucky nodded, "Me and Steve both went through boot camp there, though at different times. Nothing but mud and wet socks for miles."

"Oh God, the mud," Clint groaned laughingly, "I was there once with a team for training with the Army right before they shut down the base. I've been wetter, but like that? Nothing doing before or since. I think I'm stilling finding traces of that dirt in places."

"Even France couldn't beat the amount of mud I slogged through in Lehigh," said Bucky, "Although I would have killed for a working shower in Brittany. Where were you that was worse?"

"Three words, bro. Fishing boat. Monsoon. I think there was more water in the boat than out when we got back out on shore."

Bucky laughed. "Don't think they put me in Southeast Asia much. Too many jungles to disappear in, I think. I remember lots of sand, though."

"Middle East?" said Clint.

"Think so," said Bucky, visibly flagging and rubbing his temple, "Uh, turn here. Accident up ahead."

Clint noticed the traffic webpage on the laptop as he changed into the slow lane and said, "Where are you getting Wi-Fi from?"

Bucky pointed at the Greyhound that was pulling away from them.

\---

By the time they crawled into Raleigh, Bucky was nonverbal again, tightlipped and pale. That was fine by Clint, since the bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic was making him tetchy himself, and he didn't think he could carry on a civil conversation at the minute.

Okay, so the thing was, HYDRA bases didn't have a template. Sure, they tended to have patterns once you get inside, but really, at the end of the day, they were parasites, plain and simple. They would inject themselves into a host body, take over its mind, and replace its innards with mycelium in the shape of the host.

What he was trying to get at was: the D.C. joint might've had class, but the Raleigh hub was located in a wastewater treatment plant. Also unlike in D.C., the only security the plant had was natural human reticence towards being around open sewage tanks.

It was inside that things started getting dicey.

"Think they might be hiding something?" said Clint, smacking a goon in the ribs then across the head with his bow. They were surrounded by at least thirty HYDRA minions, at quarters too close to draw and fire.

Bucky gave him an unimpressed cock of the eyebrow, then looked pointedly at the staircase where even more HYDRA grunts were pouring out onto the catwalk. Clint was feeling a little inadequate--Bucky was fighting as well with one hand as Clint was with two.

And then someone lunged at Bucky's unprotected left side with a knife and a yell of "Hail HYDRA!" and Clint was too far away to get to Bucky in time, but he still head-butted the guy blocking his way and threw a boomerang arrow towards Bucky.

It was like being in molasses for all that his limbs would cooperate, watching the knife sink in slow motion into Bucky's side.

Bucky grunted, chopped the minion across the back of the neck, and then when the goon howled and let go of the knife, dragged him by the face over the railing. There was a yelp, an unholy splash, and Clint glanced down at the hapless crony treading algae-covered water in a vat. Bucky wrapped his hand around the handle of the knife and pulled it out with a bitten-off groan.

That was when Clint's boomerang arrow punted another grunt in the back of the head, causing him to fall over the railing, and hit the water in a giant belly flop. The resulting tidal wave sluiced over the first miserable minion.

Clint made quick work of the next handful of grunts, and then the rest seemed to suddenly remember they needed to attend to other important business. Apparently, cyanide capsules and chlorine gas were okay, but swimming in wastewater was beyond their pay grade. Bucky was back on his feet by this time, looking remarkably sanguine for someone who had just been stabbed. He nodded briskly at Clint who raced after the retreating goons, down the corridor, through the hidden stairway and into a maze of hallways.

Clint skulked through the hallways as quickly as he could, peering into row after row of identical hallways, but it was like all the minions vanished into thin air. He ran a hand through his hair in frustration.

"Here," growled Bucky's voice from somewhere close. When Clint found him just around the next bend, Bucky had his hand against his injured side, and was backing up, eyeing the door speculatively.

"Whoa, here," said Clint, kicking in the door for him.

The scientists inside scattered, leaving the computers unlocked. Something pink was convulsing in the murky row of bubbling tanks leaning against the wall.

Bucky plugged in the thumb drive and sagged against the table. A window popped up with a completion bar. One percent, five percent, seven percent.

"So how'd you know which door to bust, Rambo?" said Clint, tearing an abandoned lab coat into even strips. He'd use his own clothes, which were a lot softer, but they were filthy from the fight.

"Same floor plan," said Bucky. Clint mentally rewound, and, huh, the location within the plant was the same as the general location of the dentist chair from hell in the vault.

Bucky pulled up his shirt, and the wound was already mostly scabbed over. Any sudden movement would tear it open again, so Clint bound it tightly anyway.

"You're going to let me look at your arm later," said Clint, using a safety pin to secure the edge of the bandage in place.

Bucky nodded, resigned.

\---

"What did you do, take a pickaxe to your arm or something?" said Clint, incredulously. Inside the panel of Bucky's left arm was probably once an electronic beauty. Now it was a tangle of frayed wires. Nothing looked scorched, but he couldn't tell if any of the circuit boards were fried, which would be beyond him anyway. He'd have to get everything wired back up to see if that was the case.

"Or something," said Bucky, "Dug out a tracking device."

Clint shook his head in dismay and went to find a soldering iron.

See, now, Clint hadn't always been The Amazing Hawkeye. Master archer wasn't exactly a keyword in the wanted section of the newspaper, and a guy's got to eat, so Clint had dabbled in a lot of different industries. None of them, however, came close to the thrill of shooting, and if he were given a second chance at life, he'd still walk this road.

If it came down to setting down his bow for good though, Clint could see a quiet retirement in metalworking. Soldering, in particular, had always been soothing for him. The steady, precise placement of the soldering iron, the wait for conditions to fall into place, the way the lead solder practically leapt from his fingers to find their target--it all reminded him of the best parts of sharpshooting.

"You ever done anything like this before?" said Bucky, with not a little trepidation.

"Something like it," he said, lightly tinning the tip of the soldering iron, "Look, just lay back and think of...bald eagles or something."

Bucky gripped the arm of the davenport they were camped out on like he was trying to throttle it, grit his teeth and glared out the window. Clint shrugged and bent to the task. He checked each connection after they were tinned, then wrapped it up carefully in tiny pieces of electrical tape.

"You want to check everything before I screw it all back in?" said Clint.

Some color came back into Bucky's face. He blinked and unclenched his left fist. Looking surprised, he tested the wrist, the elbow and the shoulder, before swinging his arm in a giant arc.

"Guess you didn't muck it up too bad," he said finally.

"Aww, stop. You'll make a guy blush," said Clint dryly, unplugging the soldering iron. He grabbed an eyeglass screwdriver and, motioning for Bucky to hold still, started screwing the panels of his arm back on.

"So where'd a guy like you learn about electronics anyway?"

"I didn't. Okay, so, two years ago, a team of scientists couldn't figure out why their test results were breaking the laws of physics. Tiny subatomic particles going faster than light. They spent months going through all the fancy equations, sure that they were missing some fundamental theory of the world. Turns out, they just had a loose cable," said Clint, shrugging, "Sometimes you don't need to lead with the hundred-thousand-dollar space pen solutions--you just need a pencil."

\---

In Atlanta, HYDRA seemed to have brought the entire S.T.R.I.K.E. force down on them. But that was okay, because Clint had a fully-functional Winter Soldier on his side. Bucky was a force of nature, carving through agents like a hot knife through butter, even ones that could warp steel support beams with their bare hands and glowed orange under their skin. Clint wasn't sure if he should be jealous or relieved that he didn't receive any luminescent upgrades, but then Bucky punched one in the face and the agent exploded.

Relieved. Clint was definitely relieved. He stared at Bucky, who promptly looked insulted.

"What? It wasn't me," he said.

Clint shrugged. "Didn't say it was."

That was when Brock Rumlow dropped from above, pinning Bucky and yelling, "Stand down, Soldier. I have authorization code Romeo Delta Six Alpha--"

Clint cracked him across the skull with a frozen chicken.

Bucky shoved Rumlow off of him, flesh hand shaking. Clint held out his own hand, and Bucky used it to haul himself upright, still pale.

"Pencil solution?" he croaked.

"Pencil solution," said Clint, dropping the bird carcass.

Twenty minutes later, they were running from the poultry processing plant, Clint yelling, "How is blowing up a factory the pencil solution?" and Bucky yelling back, "They just had piles of Semtex laying around! What else was I supposed to do?"

They were barely half a mile away when the whole place blew sky-high. Clint and Bucky dove behind a car, and he could still feel the heat scorching his face. The anti-theft system of every car for a mile around went berserk.

Bucky tried to say something, but it was drowned out by the sea of incessant honking. Clint had to lean against the car, he was laughing so hard.

\---

The problem was, after Atlanta, HYDRA seemed to have wised up. The base in Tallahassee had clear signs of been recently vacated. Clint was peering under a pallet of ink cans, reaching for an abandoned scrap of paper, when Bucky barreled into him.

"Whoa, bro, where's the fire?" he asked.

Bucky shouted something, but it was lost in the mechanical clanking of the printing press. Clint pointed to his ear and shook his head. Bucky started yelling something again, but then jerked his head over his shoulder and frantically yanked on Clint's arm, dragging him to his feet. Bucky gave one last panicky look over his shoulder, kicked the pallet over, and ran for the exit, metal hand still clamped around Clint's arm.

"What the hell?" said Clint, wondering what could have spooked a man who could take down entire S.T.R.I.K.E. teams.

"We've gotta get out of here," said Bucky, still yanking him bodily over to the car, the sound faint after hours of listening to litho plates churn.

Something glinted silver in the air.

"Say, is that some fancy, flapping plane, or do they make the birds bigger here?" said Clint, squinting at the sky. Bucky slammed his foot on the accelerator pedal, peeling out of the parking lot.

Bucky still seemed shaken half an hour later, so Clint made them pull over for Greek food. Clint wolfed down a gyro while Bucky looked at his clasped hands for a long while, before he said to them, like he was at confessional,

"I punched Captain America,"

Clint carefully chewed and swallowed his mouthful of gyro. Of all the things he was not qualified for, this he was qualified for the least.

"Recently, or in the distant past?" he said, slowly.

Bucky's eyebrows were furrowed as he stared at the far wall, "Both, I think? I mean, I definitely punched him just now, and I think I've punched him. Before."

Wait, just now?

"When was this?" said Clint.

"In the printing press," said Bucky like it was obvious, "He was saying all these things like he expected me to remember, and I just--I panicked. I didn't mean to, but I had to get away."

"So you punched him in the face," said Clint, still processing  _holy shit, Captain America was there and he didn't even notice?!_

"Well, yeah. I kept telling him to stop and he wouldn't listen," said Bucky.

"Yeah, he's like that," said Clint, faking nonchalance, "So when are we going back to talk to him?"

"We're not," said Bucky, "We're running as far away as we can."

Clint tried to review the logic that would lead from point A to point F and came up empty-handed.

"Why?"

"Because we are," said Bucky, like it was self-evident, "Also, New Orleans, Austin or Bentonville?"

"What?"

"Where are we going next?"

Clint resigned himself to the change in topic and said, "New Orleans. We might be able to get there in time to catch the Easter Parades."

"You going FIGMO on me?" said Bucky, "We still got work to do."

"You know just as well as I do that all three will've been cleaned out by the time we get there," said Clint, "And the base in Bentonville's bigger, so you know Captain America will go there first."

They drove down to New Orleans.

They made it into the French Quarter in time to see the last floats of the Gay Easter Parade roll by, and Clint caught a string of beads that were being thrown. It was hours yet until the workers at the HYDRA base masquerading as a warehouse went home and they could sneak in, so he bought crispy sugared pecans and pralines, and they ate them on the banks of the Mississippi.

Clint was comfortable and almost dozing, the sun warm on his back, when he spotted a very familiar goatee, so he could be forgiven for his brain not coming online until a minute later. He sat up and nudged Bucky.

"Bro, am I seeing things?" asked Clint.

Bucky squinted at where Clint pointed for a couple seconds, and then suddenly vaulted himself into a nearby tree. Clint tracked his progress from the tree to a nearby rooftop through his peripheral vision, most of his attention trained on the dead man walking towards him.

"Evening, agent," said Nick Fury.

"Am I?" said Clint, trying for composure, "With all due respect, sir, I don't think I've collected any paychecks recently."

"And if I happened to have a job opening that fits your description?"

Clint studied him, his new shades and beret, his shoulders lighter without the heavy trench coat. He had once taken a staff to the heart for this man, and would gladly do it again. But with Coulson dead, Natasha in the wind and Bucky needing his help, he couldn't take the offer. Not yet anyway.

"I'd say I still have thirteen months of leave saved up that I plan on taking," he said, as firmly as he could, "Sir."

"Have a good afternoon then. Gentlemen," said Nick Fury, letting the wind carry his last word to where Bucky hid half a block away. He half turned away, and said, "Also, regarding our mutual friend, I think you'll find she left a word for you with another young friend. Take care."

And with that, Fury melted back into the early evening crowd, just another hat among hundreds.

Bucky still wasn't coming down, so Clint flagged down a little red-and-white wagon and bought taffy to lure him back onto street level.

\---

_"Which is when you robbed a bank," says Kate, "Wait, no, where did the hospital come in?"_

_"I'm getting there," Clint points out, "And I'd get there a lot faster if you guys stopped interrupting."_

_"What I don't get is why you turned down Fury's job offer," says Natasha, "You just said you'd choose it in any lifetime."_

_Clint scowls. Lucky whines and shoves his nose under Clint's hand, so he rubs the dog's ear. "I didn't turn down the job. I said I wanted a vacation. You know, the ones I earned?"_

_"Yeah, yeah," says Natasha, "And who'd you think was going to foot your bill? You had to be running low on cash by that point."_

\---

Okay, so the cash was a little bit of an issue. Along the way, Clint had raided two more of his stashes and he had a few more on the West Coast, but at the rate they were burning through them, there wouldn't be anything left by the time they reached California. Plus, it was fairly obvious that all of the American bases were offshoots, and that the parent chapter was somewhere in Europe, but neither one of them was getting on a plane any time soon.

"I know why I can't get through airport security," said Bucky, gesturing with his left arm, "But why can't you fly?"

Clint cleared his throat and said, "I might have pissed off TSA."

" _How_  many no-fly lists are you on?"

"All of them. Anyway," said Clint, loudly rolling out a floor plan of the abandoned children's hospital, "The Austin base is going to be bigger than the ones we've raided in the past."

The Shelby Regional Children's Hospital was a sprawling six thousand square foot facility, shut down last year while its owners faced charges of billing fraud and substandard care. There was a good chance that there wasn't going to be anyone there, just as there wasn't anyone in New Orleans, but Bucky still wasn't touching the Bentonville base and they didn't have information of any of the West Coast bases. Also, the second to last time Clint went into a mission blind he  _missed a giant, walking flag_ , so he wanted to be prepared.

But no plan survives contact with the enemy. Clint quickly realized his error when the unbolted doors swing shut behind him. The air was redolent with dust and mold, not cleaning chemicals like the other bases scrubbed of all evidence, and the doors showed signs of reinforcement only visible from the inside. Bucky tried to open them, first by hand, then by kicking it, and finally by throwing his entire body against it, metal fist first.

It barely budged.

"Pencil solution?" said Bucky.

"Let's go see what the problem is, first," said Clint.

Bucky took point as they swept the floor. All the stairwells, exits and windows were sealed and reinforced, and neither of them wanted to take their chance with the elevator. The only option left was the escalators, which led to the basement gift shop and cafeteria.

Or it would have been, if anyone had remembered to seal the ventilation shaft covers. Clint gestured for Bucky to give him five minutes and crawled as quietly as possible through the vents.

Hospitals, by and large, had terrible ventilation shafts for climbing around in, and Shelby Regional was no exception. There were dead-ends to isolation wards, sudden changes in pipe quality and age between wings, sudden twists and turns from renovations on top of renovations that left a person disoriented, and worst of all, little to no documentation of the current layout.

Which meant that while Clint meant to take the path of least resistance, he ended up in a section that was definitely not marked in his floor plan, staring through the grating at an unconscious and cuffed Steve Rogers. Three doctors milled around him, some scribbling down readings off a giant wall of analog displays, some tapping on the IV snaking up Steve's arm.

The problem wasn't so much that he  _couldn't_  free Steve from the doctors, it was that it would definitely raise alarms, which was the opposite of what they needed right now, and also that Clint was supposed to be finding a computer terminal hooked up to the servers or the servers themselves, none of which were in this room.

Bucky was going to kill him.

There was a shout from outside, and two HYDRA goons threw themselves into the room, bolted the door and backed away two steps, pointing their gun at the door. Clint kicked in the ventilation cover and dropped, throwing two daggers while in the air. One lodged in a neck, the other in a shoulder as the goon turned in surprise. Clint vaulted over Steve and the examination table and kicked the goon in the thorax. The doctors quickly back away against the walls.

He slid the hypodermic needle out of the back of Steve's hand, and disabled and pocketed the magnetic cuffs around Steve's wrists and ankles. Steve was already starting to stir. Clint quickly zip-tied the doctors to the furthest table, threw the IV bag on the floor and stomped on it, and leapt up into the ventilation shaft, sliding the vent back in place as he went.

He could hear Steve's groggy voice as he crawled away.

The ventilation shaft finally started making sense again right about the time the commotion below reached a fevered pitch. Clint mentally reoriented his mental map with his current location, took two lefts and a right, and found himself right over the server room. He kicked in the air conditioning unit, and dropped in after it.

Someone had left a monitor and keyboard helpfully attached to a server rack, so Clint tapped the keyboard to bring it out of sleep mode, and plugged in a thumb drive. The screen flashed:

**[UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS]**

**...**

**...**

**...**

**[COMMENCE TERMINATION COUNTDOWN]**

**...**

At the same time, a computerized female voice announced over the PA system, "Termination countdown commenced. T-minus 15 minutes."

"Aww, computer," said Clint, yanking his thumb drive out.

He bolted out of the room, running straight into a much less pleasant ghost.

"Oh, fuck me," said Clint.

"Only in your dreams,  _blonde_ ," said LePetre, brown-toothed grin and all.

Clint didn't have time to voice all of the  _what-the-ever-loving-fucks_  in his head, so he drew back his collapsible bow and fired straight into LePetre's left eye.

LePetre didn't even twitch.

"You  _tabarnack_  English are all alike," he said, grin turning maniacal, "Shoot first, ask later. Let's sit down for a nice little chat."

The next thing Clint knew, he was waking up with a splitting headache, a strong sense of deja-vu, and was duct-taped to--

"How are you feeling?" said Steve Rogers.

"Like I got hit in the head," said Clint, shaking his head to clear it. They were seated Indian style, back to back, in a cleared area of the cafeteria, with the entire full-patch chapter of Quebec Outlaws and what looked like the remainder of the Texas chapter pointing their rifles at the two of them. "You?"

"Peachy, after that nap," said Steve, deadpan, "Thanks for the wakeup call, by the way."

"Don't know what you're talking about," said Clint. Steve snorted softly like he knew anyway.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are," called LePetre, arrow still sticking crazily out of his eye, to the empty hallways, "Or your  _chums_  here get pumped full of lead."

The Outlaws chuckled and readjusted their aim.

"T-minus 7 minutes," said the PA system.

"So what happened to that little chat you promised?" Clint called out to LePetre, "Or are all you French liars?"

The Quebecois snarled, but LePetre just laughed and waved them off. "Oh, you think I care what you think of me. No, no, this thing, it's bigger than you and me. We will bring order to a new world."

Footsteps rang down the hallway, and then Jasper Sitwell, his face looking like a truck had rearranged it for him, stepped around the corner. Everyone turned to salute him with raised arm.

"Hail HYDRA! Hail HYDRA!"

"But you're dead!" said Steve, surging to his feet and dragging Clint along for the ride.

Sitwell made a hand motion, and the closest Outlaw started raising his gun as he turned, so Clint kicked it out of his hands, then leaned all his weight into Steve to kick both feet into the thug's chest. The goon went crashing into the guys behind him. Steve, the tank, didn't even stagger.

"T-minus 6 minutes."

That had really gotten the Outlaws' attention. The two of them circled around and Steve head-butted the closest guy, and then kicked another in the gut. Unfortunately, the move spun the side of Clint's head right into a thug's fist, and his vision had just barely started clearing when everyone dropped, eyes rolling in their head.

Even Steve was down for the count, pinning Clint at an awkward angle on his front. Clint turned his head as far as he could and realized Sitwell was the only man standing, sonic neutralizers glowing in his ears and sonic paralyzer in his hand.

That was when Clint realized he couldn't hear anything, and realized the noise cancellation on his hearing aids must have kicked in. Sitwell ran over and sawed away his bonds with a Swiss army knife, and helped Steve onto his side, letting Clint crawl out from under him.

"Thanks," Clint said, voice reverberating weirdly in his head.

"You're welcome," mouthed Sitwell.

LePetre suddenly shot to his feet, reaching for a gun, and Clint, running on adrenaline, clicked on one of the magnetic handcuffs in his pocket and threw it combat-style. It stuck like glue to LePetre's forehead, who gave a series of convulsive twitches, and then fell over.

Sitwell, who had shoved neutralizers into Steve's ears, just stared at him.

"Never let a magnet near your computer," Clint said, shrugging.

Sitwell said something, but Clint just shook his head and pointed at his ear. Steve pushed himself into a sitting position, rubbing his temples.

 _You're a fucking menace,_  Sitwell signed in ASL.

Clint grinned and flipped him the bird.

They made it out to the first floor, where the front door had been replaced by a giant hole, when some dude Clint had never seen before  _glided into the lobby on massive metal wings_ , waving his arms about something, and Sitwell and Steve took off. Clint was about to jog after them when a metal arm shot out and yanked him behind the reception desk. Clint whirled around and came nose-to-nose with Bucky.

"What the hell, bro?" he said, enunciating carefully.

Bucky yelled something at him, but it sounded like it was being filtered through an entire pool. Clint frowned. Had the batteries for his hearing aids died? Bucky yanked on his arm, again, and they ran towards a side exit.

They raced through the propped-open emergency exit just as a concussive blast of air knocked them into the pavement. All the cars around them blinked their warning lights maniacally.

\---

 _"So as it turned out, Wilson was trying to get Steve to help him persuade the police who had showed up to stay clear of the giant ball of fire that was going to happen any minute. But apparently, they weren't actually law enforcement officers--they were HYDRA agents_ dressed _like cops." says Clint, around a mouthful of lo mein._

_"Close your mouth," says Kate, wrinkling her nose._

_Clint chews and swallows. "Wilson didn't know this, of course. But Bucky knew those faces, and he knew they weren't the police. Which is why he had been taping Semtex he had saved from Atlanta to the bottom of all of their police cars while we were trussed up in the basement. Of course, he then explained all of this while I couldn't hear him, so I literally had no idea what was going on the entire time."_

_"And you still went along with it?" says Kate._

_Clint had just stuffed stir-fried green peppers in his mouth, so he makes a face at Kate. He swallows dramatically before saying, "Well, sorry if shooting Captain America in the knee doesn't exactly win me over to your side."_

_"Why the knee?" says Natasha, over Kate's shocked noises, "They had to know gut shots weren't fatal by that point."_

_"Who knows? Maybe even HYDRA has qualms about shooting Captain America," says Clint, shrugging, "So anyway, we get the hell out of dodge, but not before reporters snap a photo of someone blowing up the police in front of a children's hospital, in broad daylight, with Captain America shouting at us to stop."_

_Natasha mock whispers to Kate, "I have that news article framed on my wall."_

\---

Anyway, so that was when Clint realized they needed help. The pencil solution was getting them nowhere, but he wasn't the expert in high-tech, bells-and-whistles space-pen solutions, Natasha was.

The problem, though, was that she hadn't been responding to any of his emails, his paper-and-pen messages taped to places he knew she would be, or the trail of police reports and public sightings he had been leaving behind probably since Montreal.

He couldn't contact Kate like Fury suggested, since that would lead HYDRA straight to her; he couldn't go behind Bucky's back and send Steve or Sam as messengers, because that would be a breach of Bucky's trust, and besides, they were also targets, which would amount to knocking on her door himself anyway; and he  _definitely_  couldn't send Sitwell, whom Natasha would probably shoot on sight.

"We need to capture Brock Rumlow," said Clint, dropping into the chair across from Bucky.

Bucky started saying something, then sighed theatrically before putting away his cereal and printing, in aggressive block letters, 'WHY?'

"Natasha hates him even more than I do. Wait," said Clint, "Or Grant Ward, but who knows who's in charge of the Fridge now."

Bucky double-underlined his 'WHY?'

"Dangling Rumlow as bait is the fastest way of getting Natasha's attention," said Clint, patiently, "And it's the only way I can think of to get ahold of her right now."

'WHAT'S THE PLAN?' wrote Bucky.

Okay, so as far as Clint was concerned, the more details you put into a mission plan, the more places it could go wrong. Clint tended to favor simple but solid plans, himself. His mission plan went:

1\. Do something that will catch HYDRA's attention close to L.A.

2\. Wait for Rumlow to show up.

3\. Improvise.

4\. Success.

Bucky was not impressed at all.

"It's a great plan," protested Clint, "Some of my best missions followed that plan."

Bucky pinched the bridge of his nose, and scribbled across two napkins, 'FROM NOW ON, I MAKE THE PLANS.'

Bucky's plan was this:

1\. Stage badly botched bank robberies in Orange County, making sure Brock Rumlow's name is remembered as the perpetrator. Go to step 2.

2\. If the news attracts Romanoff, go to step 4. If not, Rumlow's pride will force him to confront us. Go to step 3.

3\. Let Romanoff take out Rumlow. Now we can track her. Go to step 4.

4\. Make first contact.

Clint couldn't see a difference between their plans, but shook on the new one anyway. They forewent baklavas, since the entire point was to be seen. He cut and buzzed Bucky's hair to match Rumlow's, and shaved his scruff into a faint 'stache. The resemblance wasn't all that great in person, but for shaky cell phone pics, it'd work fine.

The first bank they hit up was a Wells Fargo.

Bucky had simply walked in, started ranting about God knows what, and then started waving around a pistol when the security guard tried to escort him out. He made sure to sneer into every single one of the cell phones pointed at him, before punching the guard out. Bucky turned towards the frozen bank tellers, and made a little gesture by his ear. Clint, in an empty apartment eight blocks away, fired just to the left of Bucky's ear, chipping the granite floor tiles. Pandemonium broke out, the bandit barrier in front of the tellers popped up, and Bucky slipped past the police cars just pulling up to the front. Easy.

The night before, they'd printed out stacks of the released profiles of Brock Rumlow, highlighted relevant sections, and dropped them off anonymously in front of various newspaper and TV stations, so it was just a matter of sitting back until the media started paying attention.

 _Nazi Terrorist Shoots Up Bank_ , ran the first headlines in the OC Weekly. Fox News ran a special on how to protect your children in the event of a terrorist attack, then segued into a screed over tougher immigration policies. The LA Times published an editorial by a witness who sympathized with the would-be robber's Robin Hood rant. CNN camped out on the block, hoping he'd return.

"What did you  _say_  in there, bro?" said Clint, folding the paper.

Bucky shrugged, and wrote, 'WENT W/ FLOW.'

Three days later, Bucky walked into a Chase bank. The crowd of spectators actually grew as he ranted, and the security guards, now that they heard the NBC report on Rumlow's abilities, were huddled against the furthest wall.

And then Captain America burst through a stairwell.

There was what looked like a lot of yelling back and forth, and then Bucky pushed Steve. The crowd started getting a lot less friendly, and a little old lady suddenly darted forward and stabbed a letter opener into Bucky's left arm. Bucky stumbled away, trying not to hurt her, and dashed for the entrance, but even a quarter mile away, Clint could see the flash of his metal arm as he turned. There was no way the crowd hadn't noticed. Clint squeezed the trigger, and everyone's head turned as the giant 60-inch TV crashed to the ground. Bucky made a quick escape.

"This is exactly what I meant by overly complicated plans," said Clint, after he made Bucky show him the faint scratch on his arm, "Did you know Steve was after Rumlow too?"

'SORRY,' wrote Bucky. Clint ran his hands through his own hair.

Bucky started writing something, but then froze and pointed at the door. They were staying, well, technically squatting, in an empty studio apartment in downtown Santa Ana, while the owner, a single guy with few friends and who apparently rarely contacted his family, was away on a business trip out of country. No one should have been visiting.

Bucky tilted his head, then wrote, 'SITWELL.'

"Fine," sighed Clint, "Let him in."

The first thing Sitwell did was hand Clint a new pair of hearing aids. The second thing he did, after waiting for Clint to adjust them, was grit out,

"The two of you are a disgrace to the intelligence community. I'd confiscate your badge if it weren't already a moot point. What the hell were you thinking?"

"We need to get in touch with Natasha," said Clint, a little defensively.

"How does that--you know what? Don't. Don't explain your brand of crazy, or I might start believing it too." Sitwell took off his glasses so he could pinch the bridge of his nose.

"So, uh, what was with all the--" Clint made a  _sieg heil_  gesture, "at the hospital, sir?"

Sitwell sighed. "The problem with doing a great patsy is that everyone forgets that you're actually competent. I wasn't some brainwashed crony.

"Essentially, one of the unofficial mission statement S.H.I.E.L.D. has always operated under is never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Director Fury never believed it applied to him. He had an eye on one hand, sure, but that left him in the dark half the time,"

"You were his other eye," said Clint, in realization. Sitwell nodded.

"Why're you still playing the plant?" said Bucky, staring at his mismatched hands, "Pierce is dead."

"You probably know the bases better than I do," said Sitwell, "Did you notice anything different about how they've operated in the past month?"

Bucky shook his head uncertainly.

"That's because Pierce was just a figurehead, a mouthpiece," said Sitwell, "The real power is still in Europe. Now, I'm still working my way into the inner circle, but either administration is communicating with the top brass at a higher level than I'm at, or they're using some telepathic bullshit. There's a lot that's not being said."

"Well, sir, you know who has experience in hearing what people aren't saying?" said Clint.

Sitwell, who had just resettled his glasses on his nose, took them off again with a sigh.

"I'm going to regret this, aren't I? Let's go get Natasha."

\---

Sitwell actually approved of the recent fiasco with Steve.

"Look, you're trending on Twitter and Facebook among certain demographics," said Sitwell, pointing at what looked like randomly changing numbers to Clint, "There are people who don't like Captain America. You're a real hero to these folks."

He clicked on and scrolled halfway down a random Twitter feed. 'brok rumlo is a reel americn hero #fkcaptnpssy' was tweeted between 'blacks r 4x mor likly 2b lazy n POOR. #trufaks #liberlmasheen #elliszombe ' and 'DAM STR8 RT @tattooking119: Taxation Is Slavery. Whose Really Oppressed Now?! #wakeupsheeple'

"Wow, great fan base," said Clint, clapping Bucky on the shoulder. Bucky was squinting at the screen, lips moving like he was trying to sound out the words.

"So we could play into that," said Sitwell, "Have 'Brock' take a Hispanic businessman hostage, show the world how it's really supposed to be. Tie it into your last rant about freedom and control."

"You sure you're up for this, sir?" said Clint, "If Steve is here, Natasha can't be far behind. And I don't exactly have any Kevlar at hand."

"Oh, I am  _prepared_ ," said Sitwell, "Don't you worry about me."

The next day, Natasha walked in on their little play in a PNC bank and punched Sitwell in the face. There was apparently a lot of yelling between Bucky and Natasha, before she leapt in the air, threw her thighs around his neck, and twisted. And then Brock Rumlow himself walked in the front door.

Clint broke down his M-107 and dropped down to street level. He dashed down Discovery, and was turning left onto Irvine when eighty pounds of yellow fur tackled him to the sidewalk.

Aww, puddle, no.

"Lucky!" cried a very familiar voice. Clint tried to make his escape, but Lucky just whined and clung closer, bathing his face with a sloppy tongue.

Kate Bishop skidded to a halt in front of him, winded and wide-eyed.

"Hey, Katie-Kate," said Clint, trying for levity, "What're you doing here?"

"I could ask you the same thing," said Natasha monotonously, dragging behind her an unconscious Sitwell and a furious and bound Bucky, his mouth duct-taped shut. She fixed him with a look that foretold some serious, serious pain. "Explain."

Clint's mouth ran without him.

"Okay, so I'm on the run from Captain America after blowing up two cop cars with an internationally-wanted fugitive and a dead man."

He could see Kate cradling her face in her hand in his peripheral vision. Even Lucky looked slightly embarrassed for him. He rubbed the back of his neck.

"Uh, this looks bad. Let's try this again."

\---

After Clint vouched for both Sitwell and Bucky, Natasha had taken them to her tiny wood-shingled bungalow in Van Nuys, and Clint had realized--looking at the samovar with cups on a tray in the kitchen, car magazines on the bookshelves, the mismatched dining table and chairs, and tchotchkes from all over the world arranged on the mantle over the fireplace--that this wasn't so much a safe house, but a private home that Natasha was sharing. It was a heavy feeling, that she was placing so much trust in him and his word. A plane roared overhead, heading for any one of the three nearby airports.

Bucky had been adamant that Clint's thumb drive had a worm on it and confiscated it after Austin. He had handed it to Natasha.

"It's what I would have done," Natasha agreed upon hearing Bucky's side of things, "Some guys sticking unencrypted flash drives into my computers? Sure, I'll just transfer a little extra something to anything plugged into my USB ports."

" _My_  USB drive was encrypted," said Bucky in a huff.

"Not you, the other idiot," said Natasha, ignoring Clint's protestations, "I don't know yet, but I'm pretty sure that the malware will install a backdoor on whatever computer the drive is next inserted in. Have you plugged it in to anything yet?"

"Nope," said Clint, letting Lucky climb awkwardly into his lap, "I never got to download anything, and then  _someone_  stole it."

"Good for him, because I'm pretty sure that once we plug this baby in," she threw it in a flashy loop-de-loop and caught it, "to a computer connected to the Internet, HYDRA will know both where you are and what you've been doing on that particular computer in, oh, maybe half an hour or so."

"So what do we do?" asked Kate.

"We plug it into a computer," said Natasha, "But as someone once said, doors open both ways. We lead them to think we're heading in one direction, while piggy-backing on the backdoor to discover where HYDRA is on the other end, and go meet them there instead."

Natasha loaded her piggy-backing software onto an ancient ASUS notebook, and Sitwell and she rearranged Bucky's stash of HYDRA data, leaving copies of flight reservations and mission reports that made it appear they were headed towards Minsk.

Thirty two minutes after Sitwell and Bucky had set up the laptop and a pocket router in the abandoned Murphy Ranch powerhouse and announced Operation Magic Door a go, Sitwell checked in, a little breathless, "We just neutralized nine HYDRA agents. Don't extract us. We'll let you know when we get a hit on their location."

There was a ping in the background, and the sound of distant gunfire.

"Okay, never mind. Wow, that's a lot of data we're pulling. Widow, is this safe to put on a flash drive?"

"Go for it," said Natasha, "But don't you dare bring it home. I'll go to you to sandbox it."

"Hey, if both of you are leaving, does that mean I'm free to go?" said Kate.

"No," Natasha and Clint said in unison.

"Like I said before, HYDRA is out there looking for anyone connected to the Avengers," said Natasha, "You're not safe out there."

"C'mon, the whole, like, witness protection deal was stale _three weeks_ ago," whined Kate, "I have friends. I have a job. My dad will...probably notice in maybe another month or two."

"Hey, only Natasha's going," said Clint, "My computer skills are limited to writing mission reports and Minesweeper."

"So, basically only Minesweeper," said Natasha.

"And besides," said Clint, loudly, "Where else are you going to hear tales of epic adventures like these?"

"Obviously not from you," said Kate, wrinkling her nose, "I only keep you around for the coffee. And Lucky."

Lucky, the traitor, left him to go cuddle at Kate's feet. Clint snorted and trailed after Natasha to the front door. He scratched the back of his neck and asked, "So why didn't we put the thing on my thumb drive in a...sandpile thing?" 

Natasha quirked an eyebrow, but said, "Patience you must have, young padawan. I'm working on it."

"What happened to the coffee, boss?" called Kate from the living room, "Do I have to do everything around here?"

\---

HYDRA, apparently, had taken advantage of the recent unrest in Mariupol and set up not one, but six new bases in the city, as Sitwell had explained on their twelve-hour flight into Ukraine. Five of them were decoys, but they already knew which of the locations was the genuine article.

"On my mark," says Sitwell, and kicked in the faded green door of the coke plant.

The heat sensors on his new googles show that there were hundreds of warm bodies milling about in the northeast of the factory, probably a floor underground. Clint beckons and they make their way silently in that direction.

Clint steps around a giant industrial oven and, of course, that's when he gets nearly clocked in the face by a fist. Clint vaults backwards, tuck-flips onto a conveyor belt and, tugging off the dim goggles, wraps a cable arrow around a magnetic handcuff and fires.

The cuff strikes the goon in the temple, pinning him in place against the steel oven door. The guy convulses twice, and then goes still.

Clint fires a broad-tip arrow at the release mechanism of the cuff, reels it back in, and climbs up another layer of conveyor belts. There are six more goons, none with body heat, slowly surrounding them in a pincer movement.

"Widow, be advised of two hostiles at your 7 and 5 o'clock," he breathes into his comm, "Soldier, three hostiles at your 3 o'clock."

"Copy that, Hawkeye," says Natasha. Bucky clicks once in confirmation.

He lines up and fires at the goon sneaking up on Sitwell, pinning him against the quenching tower. Sitwell jumps in surprise, but, seeing the downed henchman, gives Clint a thumbs up.

There's static as the comms attempt to cancel the sounds of exertion. All of the men are down by the time Clint retrieves his cuff the same way. He tosses one each to Natasha and Sitwell.

"How'd you know about the Life Model Decoys?" says Sitwell, running the cuffs from forehead to nape of the closest goon. Natasha watches him, then follows suit.

"The what now?" says Clint.

"Those things," says Sitwell, waving in the general direction of the goons, "LePetre too."

"Oh, that's what they're called?" says Clint, and shrugged, "I just figured, HYDRA can put human memories and emotions in a computer, and they can obviously make prosthetics decades ahead of ours. Why wouldn't they combine the two?"

"That...actually makes sense," says Sitwell, "Huh. Still doesn't explain your terrible taste in card games."

Clint sucks in air to disabuse Sitwell of all of his incorrect notions, when--

"More hostiles coming up the northeast stairwell," comes Bucky's voice over the comms.

Clint takes to the ceiling beams. He can see Sitwell skulking towards the stairs, hugging the walls. Natasha had simply melted into the darkness.

The heat-sensing goggles picks up Bucky's heat signature, moving rapidly in what looked like fighting stances. Everything around him, though, is at room temperature. Natasha slinks quickly towards him, Sitwell, much slower. Clint tiptoes swiftly across the beam until he's in clear view of the fight, pulls off his goggles, and shoots three putty arrows into the whirlwind of combat.

Bucky looks bemused, standing arms akimbo in the middle of a crowd of LMDs frozen in awkward poses, putty gumming up their joints. Natasha runs the cuffs over each of their heads, and Clint watches them drop like dominos.

"I had them on the ropes," Bucky says, affronted.

"Sure you did," says Natasha. She glides down the stairs.

In the basement, the bustle of activity turns out to be scientists bustling about a high-vaulted warehouse, lined along all four walls with bubbling vats that looked very familiar.

"Do those things look like the vats they had in Raleigh to you?" says Bucky. Clint nods, mutely. There could be over a hundred of the vats, if his rough estimate is correct.

One lab coat pulls open the clear cover of a vat, and a fully-naked man tumbles out. Two others haul a robotic skeleton off a gurney and shove it into the vat. They slam the door shot.

The naked man on the floor sits up groggily, and a voice over the PA says, "Subject 5284, state your identity."

The man thinks for a moment, "I don't know."

The scientist hits him with a stun baton and the man screams.

The PA repeats, "Subject 5284, state your identity."

"I don't--I don't--"

The scientist applies the stun baton for longer this time.

"Subject 5284, state your identity."

"S-subject 5284."

"Good," says the PA, as the man slowly curls into a ball, "Order only comes from pain."

"Hail HYDRA!" comes the chorus from every scientist, "Hail HYDRA! Hail HYDRA!"

Bucky stumbles into the wall, shaking and pale.

"C'mon," says Sitwell, swallowing thickly, "the office was south of here in the blueprint."

The hallways are empty, and so is the office. The hairs on the back of Clint's neck prickle with unease, but they're so close. There has to be something there. He scans the walls for hairline cracks, Natasha rifles through the desk, and Sitwell is muttering to himself, flipping through the bookshelf.

"We have incoming," says Bucky, standing sentry at the entrance.

Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, monocle much bluer than his photos suggested, strides down the hallway, flanked by an assistant and a girl who looks around Kate's age.

"Gentlemen," says the Baron, his monocle glowing blue, "Ma'am. Good morning."

He turns to Sitwell. "I believe you brought me gifts?"

"Of course," says Sitwell, slamming the cuff into Bucky's left shoulder. Bucky screams and collapses, right hand scrabbling at his metal arm, "You can do whatever you want with them."

Clint lunges towards Sitwell, the  _rat_ , but a whirl of white knocks him into the wall. Just before darkness overtakes him, he hears Sitwell say, far, far away,

"Hail HYDRA!"

\---

Clint wakes up alone in a cell, because of course he does. He looks around, and finds no vents, no drains, and no windows. Clint checks his pockets and everything, even the lock-pick sewn into the seam of his jeans, are gone. Thankfully, his hearing aids have been left in, which means that the built-in transceiver is still in his ear. He starts whistling the  _William Tell Overture_ softly.

He gets about four bars in when he hears a reply both in his comm piece and echoing through the hall.

"Doing okay there, Tonto?" says Natasha drily, Bucky prowling two steps behind her, left arm strapped to his side. She fiddles with the cell door for a second and it swings open on rusty hinges.

"Just getting ready to decorate my lance with the White Man's hair," says Clint, jogging out after them, "Metaphorically speaking."

"They're moving east, past Novoazovsk," says Bucky, holding out a cell phone. It's hard to tell, the screen bouncing with every step, but Clint thinks he recognizes the map interface as one of Natasha's tracking apps, "The roads are mostly down, luckily, so they'll be going slow, but they'll be in Russia by nightfall."

"When'd you stick a tracking device on Sitwell?" says Clint. When she doesn't answer, he realizes-- "Wait, we've all got a tracking device on us somewhere, don't we? Where's mine?"

He pats down his body again. Natasha rolls her eyes.

"If you can find it, then I didn't do my job well enough," she says, "Sitwell, von Strucker and the girl probably won't give us much trouble--did you see what knocked us out?"

Clint shakes his head. "Too fast."

"That's what I was afraid of," she sighs, "Here."

She picks up a duffel bag from behind a security guard's desk, its occupant sprawled against a partition, and slings it at Clint. Inside are his bow, shooting braces and enough trick arrows to take down a platoon of Chitauri. Clint might have whimpered in glee.

His head buried in the sack, Clint doesn't realize that they have company until he nearly runs headfirst into an entire army of LMDs. The androids are packed eight abreast at perfect attention, with soulless staring eyes. The phalanx stretches back so deep Clint can't see the last row.

As Clint windmills his arms to a stop, all of the robotic eyes suddenly snap to his face. The closest ones shudder, like they're warming up. One starts slowly taking a step forward.

Bucky yanks Clint by the back of his t-shirt into the space between two pushing machines and they sprint for the exit.

"Don't you dare compare this to Budapest," snarls Natasha as they run.

Behind them, Clint can hear the mechanical sounds of a thousand LMDs coming online.

"Well, you do have nicer hair," Clint yells back.

"What the hell are you two talking about?" yells Bucky, pulling a lever on the raw materials bin. Fifteen tons of unprocessed lignite coal rolls down a steel ramp, smothering everything in its path like a brown avalanche.

Clint glances at Natasha, who gives a tiny nod, so he says, "Okay, so, many, many moons ago, S.H.I.E.L.D. sent me to clean out their Budapest problem."

They're running towards the waterfront. Clint can see the Sea of Azov peeking between the broken teeth of bombed-out buildings.

"See, Hungarian crime bosses were mostly local players at the time, even in the capitol. But someone calling herself Fekete Ozvegy--the Black Widow, was making Budapest into an international black market negotiation center for players from Lithuania to Turkey."

LMDs burst out of the processing plant, black as coalminers. Clint can see boats in the distance, but the streets were cluttered with rubble and trash. He points at the tallest building for miles--a mostly undamaged six story apartment complex, and motions for them to climb.

"Now the Black Widow codename had been infamous in the intelligence community for decades. We couldn't tell if it was one operative working all of the USSR, or, more likely, a title given to top female KGB assassins and spies."

"It couldn't have been a name taken up by freelancers?" says Bucky as they run up the fire escape. Clint looks, and the LMDs are a lot closer than they were before. "You know, like how everyone claims to Anonymous?"

"Apples to oranges," says Clint, "And also a topic for when we're not being chased by killer robots."

"How is any story appropriate when being chased by killer robots?" calls Natasha from the rooftop. She steps back so Clint and Bucky can climb after her onto the deck.

Out on the wharf, abandoned fishing boat dot the beach at low tide like sunning seals. A Russian Coast Guard ship carefully navigates the shore. Three Coast Guards patrol the deck, with a fourth at the wheel. Clint nocks three tranq arrows, aims, takes a breath, f-i-r-e-s...

The arrows fly true. Before the three Guards can hit the deck, Clint draws a cable arrow and fires it into the mast.

"Boom," says Clint, smug.

"How many miles of cable wire did you pack?" asks Bucky, incredulously.

Natasha sighs, and hitches her thumb at Clint, "When your only archer makes a habit of falling twenty-plus stories off of buildings, you make sure R&D modifies his gear to compensate."

She hooks a D-ring onto the wire, ties her jacket to it as a makeshift harness, and jumps. Clint can hear rhythmic clanking, and sure enough, the LMDs are stampeding up the fire escape. He draws a flare arrow and motions for Bucky to go next.

Coal, still one of the top three fossil fuels consumed today, was one of man's first sources of heat and light for three reasons: wide availability, high net energy gain, and an ignition temperature as low as 482 degrees Fahrenheit.

Unfortunately, it also has the tendency to spontaneously combust in powder form.

And so when Clint deploys his magnesium flare arrow, which burns at almost four thousand degrees, into a crowd of LMDs lined almost shoulder-to-shoulder and covered in fine coal dust, it isn't so much the brightness of the flare that halts the phalanx in its tracks--it's the gigantic orange fireball that takes out half a city block.

"So you were telling me about the Black Widow," says Bucky, back to the smoldering port of Mariupol.

Clint, who had commandeered the captain's wheel ("I'm great with boats!"), thinks a bit and says, "Oh, right. So, we were pretty sure that all of the Black Widows came from the same place because A) their patterns were all the same and B) their targets all aligned with Moscow's political goals at the time. However,"

Clint nods at Natasha, who had just entered the pilothouse.

"However," says Natasha, without missing a beat, "Our little spider appeared to be behaving erratically. She was taking out targets friendly to Russia, and adapting to local techniques wherever she went."

Clint nods. "So part of my mission was to ascertain if this was the same Widow, or an imposter. And if it was the genuine article, S.H.I.E.L.D. wanted to know what had made her escape her leash."

"Did they give you the option of bringing her in?" asks Bucky, pursing his lips.

"Nope," says Clint, turning it a two-syllable word, "The Black Widow was infamous for being able to manipulate anyone into doing her bidding, so any agent attempting to argue against termination was assumed to be compromised. Also, S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn't even sure if there was a person under all that programming."

Natasha smiles bitterly. There's a muffled clanging on the floorboard, and she sighs and gets up.

"Don't get to the good part before I get back," she says.

"Anyway, so I get to Budapest, I blend in with the underground, and it turns out, my drug lord boss has a meeting with a Fekete Orzsebet, which was either the world's worst alias or she wanted everyone to know. So there I am, standing around, looking like the hired thug I'm supposed to be, and there are five scarred, nasty-looking guys and this super-hot chick. And it was like watching a magician at work.

"She would drop a few words into the conversation, and suddenly Boss A and Boss C, who had fought turf wars over northern Pest for twenty years, were bosom buddies. She'd make an innocent remark, and suddenly Boss B would be trading his long-hoarded guns to Boss F. And so on and so forth.

"And apparently she liked having me there, for whatever reason. So I would attend the meetings with the Black Widow, and then I'd come back and report to Sitwell, who was my handler for this mission. The consensus that came back was, among the analysts, yes, these were all the ways the Widow operated, and because what she was doing was detrimental to the global community at large, yes, she would have to be taken out."

They were crossing the Russian border by this point, the sea as orange as summer marigolds.

"So the next day, I show up for work as usual to avoid suspicion on everyone's part. Except, it turns out she had called an emergency meeting.

"So I have no choice but to go, during which she drags in an American girl, throws her in the middle of the room, and tells me to shoot her.

"Well  _that_  wasn't in the job description. I refuse, and she goes, 'that's right, I knew you were a spy right from the start. All you CIA types are alike,' and so she tells everyone else in the room to shoot us."

"It was chaos, I'm telling you. Absolute pandemonium. They started out shooting at us, but then it turned out you can't buy friendship with a few pretty words, so the feuds broke out again and they started shooting at each other on top of shooting at us.

"So we finally get out of there, and I learn that the American actually was CIA, on a covert mission to stop the human trafficking picking up pace through Budapest."

"Well, gee, that's a coincidence," says Bucky.

"That's what I thought too," says Clint, "So I call it in to Sitwell, who confirms that there was indeed CIA presence in the area. Any additional information from them, however, was sadly unavailable."

Clint rolls his eyes.

"So Laura--that was the girl's name--and I decide to take out the businesses of the crime lords associating with the Widow, kind of show them it wasn't worth working with her. This would, of course, weaken the trafficking rings in central Hungary, as well as flush out the Black Widow. Win-win, right?

"So we stage all of these attacks on the mobs, and it wasn't long before no one was taking calls from the Black Widow, for fear of being targeted next. And so, seeing her support dry up, she called a truce, and invited us to meet with her."

"Not suspicious at all," says Bucky.

"Exactly. So Laura and I agree, after some debate, that I would be the one to talk face-to-face with her, and she'd call in the cavalry if anything went south. So I go in to the meeting, where it started up cordial, and ended up with the doors locked and her waving a pistol in my face and screaming that she was going to kill me.

"Naturally, this was when the police kick down the doors, and, when they see me, pointing a bow and arrow at a poor little woman and her, weapon suddenly gone and weeping piteously, of course it's me they arrest."

Natasha walks back in, shaking out her hand.

"They charged him with domestic terrorism," she says, "Apparently they thought he was the leader of the Arrows of Hungarians."

Bucky lets out a bark of laughter.

"It was  _so_ not funny at the time, bro," says Clint, "So I'm sitting in jail, and the police are stonewalling all attempts at getting to a phone, so, fine, whatever, I trip the emergency GPS beacon, and sit around to wait for my extraction. Ten hours later, a S.H.I.E.L.D. team shows up at the front door. But at the same time, a little cat burglar named Laura shows up, and starts breaking me out too.

"I mean, I knew things were bad, but I didn't know  _how_  bad they were, until the police started shooting at my colleagues."

"The police were in on it?" says Bucky, wide-eyed.

"The police were in on it," confirms Clint, "I never found out if they were a legitimate police force or a mob set-up with fake officers. But then, I started realizing a lot of things weren't what they seemed.

"For one: there was Laura. The maneuver patterns and strategies that she had been employing looked a lot like a string of Robin Hood operations in the area that no one was 'fessing up to doing. And for an American, she wasn't picking up on many of the pop culture references I was throwing out.

"For another: the Black Widow seemed overly naive. She was genuinely shocked that we would come after her, just as she didn't expect her house of cards to collapse so readily. It seemed more like she had read the exploits of Black Widows before her and wanted to test them herself."

"Basically, he finally wised up and drew a gun on me," says Natasha.

"Wait," says Bucky, " _You_  were Laura?"

"That's me," she says, smiling, "I had packed my bags and tried to make a new life for myself, under a new name. But of course it wasn't that easy, and most of the time, it seemed like I was doing more harm than good and getting everyone killed."

She looks at him carefully, "I knew that I was working for the KGB against my will, but it didn't absolve me of the nightmares in my head or the blood on my hands. It took years for me to realize: we are all more than the sum of our parts.

"But back then, the only thing I had was my past, and Moscow knew they could hook me by dangling it in front of me. Yelena was an Army cadet, but she was fast-tracked to becoming the next Black Widow after I defected. I wanted to save her, but in the end--"

"I shot her," says Clint, "It's on me. I know what it's like, loving too much to let go, even when it kills you in the end, and I didn't want Nat sucked down the path I went through. I'd seen the person she was underneath."

And it was like looking in a mirror. He'd asked her if she wanted a chance to balance her ledger, and she had stared at him as if he was crazy.

 _'I was born with too much red ink,'_ she had said.

 _'And I can't erase that for you,'_ he'd said,  _'But, you know, a black pen writes just as well on a red page as it does on white.'_

They were pulling into the little port town of Taganrog.

"So, anyway," says Clint, "Moral of the story? Never trust anyone who tells you they're CIA."

"Copy that," says Bucky, "So, what, are you trying to say Sitwell just needs a gentle hand?"

"What I'm  _saying_ , bro, is that my eyes haven't been wrong yet," say Clint, bringing the life boat around for deployment, "Although I wouldn't say no to smacking Sitwell myself."

Bucky clears his throat. "So, hey, uh, th--"

"Nope, don't you dare," says Clint, "If you want, do one thing for me and we'll be even."

"Yeah?" says Bucky, apprehensively, and they clamor into the boat, "What's that?"

"Talk to Steve--nicely this time, will you?" says Clint, and over Bucky's groan, "Look, I'm not looking for giant declarations and waving flags in the background. I just--no one says you gotta be whoever you were in the '30s. I mean,  _I've_  met you, and we're bros, right? It's not like Steve's gonna look at you one day and...do whatever it is you're worried he's going to do."

"I'm not that guy," says Bucky, face in his hands, "And I'm never going to be. Steve's gonna--he's got expectations."

"Which is why you set Steve straight," says Clint, "Not rocket science."

"And not a space pen either," says Natasha, with a perfectly straight face. The boat hits the water, and they steer for land.

\---

"How the hell does Steve get into a car with you voluntarily?" says Clint, crawling out of the car on wobbly legs. Behind him, Bucky is leaning against the car door, his hand on his knees. He scrubs his hand over his face.

Clint had spent the last fifteen minutes learning how Natasha developed her frankly terrifying driving skills. Among the many horrors he can now say he lived through are: cars barreling down sidewalks, pedestrians strolling down the center lane like it's a boardwalk, a truck merging left across oncoming traffic from a grassy field at 60 mph without any headlights, and multiple cars  _accelerating_  through red lights. Natasha had ducked and weaved and spat insults through it all like a champion boxer.

"Short memory span," says Natasha, "I hear it's the first thing to go when you age."

The GPS signal had been coming from the airport, a three-hangar affair. Even from the parking lot, they can hear the sounds of running turbines. They jump the fence easily and sprint for the hangar, illuminated in harsh floodlights, when there is a streak of white darting at them.

Clint barely wraps his fingers around a net arrow before something clubs him in the side of the head.

Clint wakes up trussed up to a business-class seat in a moving plane with magnetic handcuffs. He wonders if this was what the old fortune teller meant when she said he was meant for higher things.

"Good morning," says von Strucker, "I take it you refused my upgrades?"

"They didn't have my color," says Clint, "I want a refund."

Beside him is the girl, resigned and heartbroken and staring at someone behind him. Clint cranes his neck and--oh, that explained a lot of things. A boy, a near carbon copy for the girl except with white hair, stands stiffly, his eyes the phosphorescent blue of Clint's worst nightmares.

"Yes, I'm told you are familiar with the effects of the extraterrestrial's weapon," says von Strucker, following his gaze, "I find it is quite...miraculous."

"Where are the others?" growls Clint.

"Oh they are quite secure, I assure you," says von Strucker, "I merely wanted to test the effects of repeated exposure."

Clint throws himself back against the sea cushion, but between the unyielding cuffs and the apparently reinforced seatback, he barely rocks it. He continues to thrash nonetheless, even knowing how futile the exercise is.

Von Strucker advances with Loki's staff, "Do you not enjoy the weapon's touch? Relax, little archer. I have been told it is an out-of-this-world experience."

He touches the staff to Clint's heart, and everything turns blue.

\---

\---

The thrall does not know when he was no longer his master's.

 _Hawkeye_ , whispers a stranger.

Is that him? He guesses so. It's not his master voice, though, and he shoves at the pink mist surrounding him, which wavers and thins under his hand. The sea of calm, unthinking blue lies just behind his reach.

 _Please, you must help my brother_.

Brother? The thrall has a sudden sense-memory of running after someone in hay-scented fields,  _cmon-clint-you-gotta-run-faster._

 _Clint_ , he thinks,  _Barton. Barney. Hawkeye. Archery. Carson-duquesne-chisholm-furyshieldbobbinatashacoulsonavengersbuckynatasha--_

 _Von Strucker_ , he thinks.

 _Yes,_  says the voice,  _you must free my brother from the clutches of the Baron_.

 _What've I done this time?_  he asks the voice frantically.  _Are the others safe?_

 _You cannot dwell on that now,_  says the voice, and Clint suddenly remembers the dark-haired girl and her brother,  _we have but little time._

Clint blinks and finds himself marching down a hall, the pipe-lined ceiling as low as only underground bunkers can be, compelling by the tug of his blue, blue heart. He surreptitiously counts doors and halls as he breezes past HYDRA grunts, all of whom, he notices, give him a wide berth.

His feet carry him into what was probably once a mess hall, a company of goons standing at parade rest as von Strucker pontificates on a wooden stage, Sitwell kneeling and bleeding at his feet. The white-haired boy's heart is the bluest point in Clint's Prussian-tinted vision, bright as an arc reactor. Natasha and Bucky stand in a cage behind von Strucker, still bound in magnetic cuffs.

"And today, to celebrate our victory against our enemies, I deliver justice upon the coward and traitor in our midst, Jasper Sitwell."

"Hail HYDRA!" shout the grunts.

A goon hands him his bow and quiver. Clint notices a few trick arrows mixed among the others.

"And remind all of you that HYDRA only tolerates complete loyalty."

"Hail HYDRA!"

 _Shoot him_ , murmurs his master's will.

Clint draws and nocks a boomerang arrow, and fires. It flies high over Sitwell's head, where he knows it will bounce back off the far ceiling. There is a shout of surprise, and a harsh tug on his ensnared heart. That bright blue heart streaks towards him a half second before the white-hair boy follows, like a fish on a line, and Clint is already nocking a putty arrow.

_Clint remembers one of the worst fights he had had with Bobbi._

_"Here, let me put it in terms that you would understand. This arrow is filled with rheopectic putty," she said, waving a putty arrow in his face, "which, when you try to force it around, turns stiff and unyielding, but when you respect it, it stays as fluid as water._

_"You want actual communication? Fine. This putty is our marriage, and_ you _, Clinton Francis Barton, have never tried taking a step back."_

Clint never sees when the putty deploys, but then the boy is glued to the floor with viscous putty, thrashing as hard as he can against bonds that simply hold him tighter still. Struggling in his bonds, the boy never sees the boomerang arrow that clocks him in the head and knocks him out.

Clint fires a broad-tipped arrow at a loose screw in the pipes overhead, sending dirty water pouring over the heads of the goons, and pooling around their feet. He lets it spread before nocking an electro-arrow, aiming it where the water is deepest. The grunts sputter and flail.

"Gentlemen," he says, "It's been a pleasure."

He fires. Turning around, he sees the dark-haired girl is rushing towards her unconscious brother, Sitwell has von Strucker in a half-Nelson, and Natasha and Bucky looking like the cool cucumbers they are.

He unlocks the cage and frees them, and hands the released cuffs to Sitwell, who secures von Strucker.

"Thanks, Wanda," Sitwell says to the girl.

"Oh no, thank you," said Wanda, cradling her brother's head in her arms, "If it weren't for your encouragement, I would have lost hope long ago."

"You were  _not_  kidding about that telepathy," says Clint, feeling color bleed back into his world, "So what did I--"

"Once again, don't," says Natasha, "Or do I have to recalibrate your cognition again?"

Clint mimes zipping his lips.

\---

"So what happened in there?" says Clint, after his mission report.

They're flying one of von Strucker's plane, luckily not the same one they flew in on, out of the bunker in the Austrian Alps. Bucky is copiloting, or rather, putting the fear of God in the terrified HYDRA pilot, and Natasha has an eye on their prisoner.

"Wanda reached out to me telepathically in Mariupol," says Sitwell, "I agreed help her save her brother, but that would mean staying close to von Strucker, and in return, she would keep you three safe."

"The Baron kept us isolated from everything. Before the staff, Pietro and I were not even allowed outside of our cells. After, of course," Wanda grabs Pietro's hand, "He kept Pietro enthralled and used his safety as collateral for my cooperation. Mr. Sitwell was the only person I could think of that might assist us."

Clint can see why it wouldn't work in the opposite direction. Pietro could disable von Strucker before he could command Wanda to do anything. He swallows down the rest of his questions--they weren't happy memories for Wanda, and, Natasha was right, it would do nothing for his own peace of mind.

"Got any plans, now that you're free?"

"Oh haven't we, Pietro?" she says, eyes dancing in excitement. Pietro's lips quirk, and he nods mutely, "My brother and I want to experience the world!"

"We'll see to it that you can," says Sitwell, "I'll make sure that S.H.I.E.L.D. sponsors your trip, and you can ask anything you want from us."

Wanda leaps up from her seat and throws her arms around Sitwell, who pats her awkwardly on the back. Natasha comes in just then, and Wanda bounces over to her to tell her the good news. Pietro keeps glancing between Sitwell and Wanda with consternation.

When Clint's sure Wanda's not listening, he leans in closer to Sitwell. "S.H.I.E.L.D.'s good for the bill, huh? I thought we didn't exist anymore."

Sitwell chuckles, and says, "Oh no, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s definitely around, just undergoing restructuring. Nick said that you were considering his job offer--I think you should take it."

"Nick? What happened to 'Director Fury'?" says Clint, only half joking.

"This is why you need to join--you're missing out on so much," says Sitwell, grin spreading, "C'mon, I have a conference call in twenty minutes. I bet the new director's dying to talk to you again."

Clint and Bucky end up trailing after Natasha to her home in L.A., the lone fig tree in the yard now decorated with purple fruit. There's only one thing left, and Clint stares Bucky down until he caves and borrows Natasha's phone.

Bucky paces the living room, stepping over a sleeping Lucky with every circuit of the room, until the call connects.

"Hey, Steve," he says, voice wavering only a little, "It's me, Bucky."

Natasha reaches over and tugs the hearing aids out of Clint's ears.


	2. A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to Mariupol

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Basically, short scenes that didn't make it into the final story.

They’re barely an hour into a twelve hour flight to Mariupol, in a private plane Natasha had somehow acquired, and Clint's bored, Natasha and Bucky look bored, and Sitwell is ignoring all of them in favor of reading through the background materials again for the sake of his sanity, as he'd loudly proclaimed.

 

Clint turns to Natasha, and says, "So what happened to Rumlow after the bank, anyhow?"

 

Natasha just smiles, Sphinx-like.

 

"Aww, c'mon," Clint definitely doesn't whine, "You gotta give me more than that."

 

“Where the hell are the rest of your cards?” Bucky asks, baffled, Clint's pack of playing cards in his hand, Clint's sack open and rifled through at his feet.

 

Clint had taken a standard pack of Bicycle playing cards, and removed everything except the nines through Aces, shoving in a pencil stub and scraps of paper in the space left behind.

 

“Why would I need more?” says Clint, equally mystified, “Those are all the cards you need for the greatest card game on Earth.”

 

“Oh, no, not this again,” says Natasha. Bucky just looked confused.

 

“C’mon, I’ll teach you,” says Clint, motioning for Bucky to sit back down, “Please, Nat? You can’t play Pepper with only three people.”

 

“Yeah, Nat,” Bucky says with a lopsided grin, apparently on board now, “How bad could it be?”

 

Natasha sniffs disdainfully.

 

“Fine, but losers pay for gas,” she says, grabbing the cards from Bucky and dealing with practiced ease.

 

“Do I get a say in this?” says Sitwell, with an air of despair.

 

\---

 

"We are go for launch," says Natasha's voice over the comms.

 

"Roger that, flight, loud and clear," says Clint.

 

"What is with you people and cheesy NASA-speak?" groans Kate. Lucky tries to steal her pizza.

 

"Hey, when you bankroll our operation, you get to set the protocols," says Clint, grinning, "Be glad we didn't decide on Star Trek."

 

Clint is busy trying to keep Lucky away from his spare socks as he goes over his gear one last time, when Kate knocks on his doorframe. That's a first, so he looks over in surprise. Lucky, seeing his chance, snatches the ball of socks out of his hands and makes a break for it, only to be thwarted by Hawkeye reflexes.

 

"So uh, guess you're glad you don't have to babysit me anymore, huh?" says Kate, looking at where her hand is clutching Lucky's purple collar.

 

Kate was awesome; Kate was perfect. Kate should never have a reason to look so glum.

 

"Hey," says Clint, catching her eye, "Who's babysitting whom here? Us Hawkeyes have to look out for one another."

 

Kate smiles, tentatively. "Well, guess I'll see you around, Hawkeye."

 

"Sure thing, Hawkeye," Clint said, winking.


End file.
